Character concept design

Welcome in how I do my ‘character concept design‘ tutorial. This one is basically for tablet users. It will be very hard to make it with a mere mouse; but I do know such people, who prefer mice to tablets (maniacs).

Intro: we will make some characters for the game. We will start from rough sketches (in part 1) and take one of the sketches for further color illustration (in part 2 soon).

So let’s start then the way I prefer to do it:

Create a wide forma high DPI resolution image, for example this one.

I prefer to fill m document with something warmer than white – it is too bright for me. Mild grey is ok .

Here is the brush that I’m using to create my first character. I must say that it took me a while to understand the purpose of PS brushes. In fact you can create almost everything using maximum 5 brushes if you understand how the brush settings work.

Starting from black color I’ve created a low details silhouette… Outlined it with a mere brush without any settings at all. I’ve also dropped a little bit of lights on the leg, shoulders and the rest of highlighted areas.

I do these quick sketches (30 min max) to understand the shape of my character basically.

Next: starting form light grey. This character will be a mysterious warrior of some kind. We’ll deal with his personality a little bit later. But note that you will be given the character description in the beginning so you will have to create characters sticking only to this description.

Every artist has different ways to paint the value: well actually there are only 2 ways to do it: either you prefer to go from highlights (or mid tones) to darks or VS. I drop shadows (blacks) in the very end.

And here is N2. I’m also come back to drop some details on the previous characters, but these are just quickie ones.
N3:
Number 3 will be a wiki or some king of swampy. Really long legs and hidden face…

N4 will be a non human with grig like legs and crazy haircut: some king of psycho character.

While building a character you should always think about the story of this character: where he came from, his attitude to life and a lot of other things.

Beginning from the head:

Concept art tic: it always better to develop the face of the character
away from the form and body shape. Of course there is a way to render
high quality sketch from scratch, but you will probably be told to
develop several more. That is why it is better to draw the faces
separately. A lot of the personality is put in the faces and their
emotions.

Here are the faces.

I’m beginning with outlines this time.

N2.
I really like how the 2nd done came out: started with blocking the values from start.

N3.
The 3rd one came out really good too. It has plenty of details on his mask.

N4
– Number 4 has a little bit long neck, but in the rest he turned out
well. The same technique was used on N4: blocking the colors from start
and just playing with the value.

…A little skin reflection. Better to use some texture on the brush – like I didn’t

And
here we are: we’ve just created 4 character concepts. It was a lot of
fun to do this. I hope you’ve enjoyed it like I did and really learned
something. So practice a lot to master your skill in painting; the
speed will come in time.